Miniclip’s Team Awesome Have Got The Halloween Games Sorted

With Halloween fast approaching, we thought it’d be an appropriate time to take a look at Miniclip’s Halloween themed games.

Over the years Miniclip has built up a strong collection of spooky titles, including Hotel Skeleton, a puzzling skeleton smasher, and this week it released Zombie Karts, which allows you to take control of your very own zombie and race it to victory.

You might wonder how Miniclip happens to have an array of Halloween games that we just pull out of the box in late October.

The answer is, of course, lots and lots of planning. This responsibility falls to Team Awesome, and they are the guys who are responsible for selecting and adding the games to Miniclip.com.

As you can imagine, this involves spending serious amounts of time testing the games thoroughly, making sure that they’re sufficiently awesome, as well as scheduling releases, sometimes to an occasional tight deadline. All of this careful planning ensures that the Halloween games are finished in time for Halloween… and not the week after.

Does sir require more zombies?

I had a quick chat with one of Team Awesome, Rob, to find out a bit more about the game release process.

Can you tell us what a typical game release is like, from concept to publication?

Team Awesome cover a variety of things, but our main goal is to release great games on the website.

We often come up with concepts and commission a developer to bring our ideas to life. The developer delivers the game and we give the game a thorough test, provide feedback and suggestions. The developer follows guidelines which we set to make sure the game is suitable for release. Once the game is ready to sign off we schedule the game for release.

We then need to liaise with the Art Team to produce website editorial such as banners, icons, animations and so on. On release day we give the game a test and push everything over to a testing location and make sure everything works, then once we’re happy we push live to the website where we give the everything another test.

Team Awesome at work, um, finding awesome games!

Can you tell us a little about the game testing process?

We use a small army of Beta Testers to help provide feedback on games in development; [they] test incoming games thoroughly, [they see] how we can improve them, remove bugs, improve the user experience and generally make our game the best on the internet.

So once a game is out, what happens then?

[Team Awesome] keep the website looking fresh, [so we] update the homepage with different games and categories based on popularity and seasonal requirements… [we always] pick a suitable and relevant release time for games; we wouldn’t release a Christmas game in the summer!

Thanks, Rob, for taking the time to answer those questions — and next time you’re on Miniclip, just take a minute to appreciate the time that Team Awesome take to make sure you’re not fighting ghosts in the middle of summer.